He said: "We have a lot of good forwards here and it's very hard to get into our front line.

"To be fair, Shefki was down the pecking order. As a loan player coming in from a Championship club he was always going to be 'just in case'.

"But he came in last week and did an excellent job for half an hour. The test now will be if I start him, can he do it for 90 minutes?

"After we lost Brian, Shefki was brought in on the premise that if we needed a big frontman he was it and the minute he won his first header it livened everyone up and made the Reading centre-halves think 'We're in a game now'.

"But Liverpool will be a different game and we'll need different things up there than we needed for Reading.

"We can't be as gung-ho away [from home] and we perhaps need the players that will frighten Liverpool."